[Play Raw] St Monans Breakwater, Fife Scotland.

Brian_Innes · 2018-05-04 11:10:23 UTC

I invested in some cheap circular screw in 10 stop ND filters last week, so I took a trip down to St Monans, to check out the famous breakwater. Unfortunately high tide did not coincide with either sunrise or sunset, so had to make do with a rather dullish day as high tide was at 4pm.

Anyway, here is one of the more interesting shots of the breakwater:

IMG_1925.CR2 (24.6 MB)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 2 by Brian Innes

And here is my attempt at processing the image in Darktable to a mono shot, all I did was global tonemap,

and the darktable xmp file. IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (4.0 KB)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 2 by Brian Innes

It will be interesting to see other peoples take on this image. Might be one I submit to my local photographic associations competitions next season.

Very happy with the screw in ND filters though. Not as easy to use as a square slot in filter, but a tiny fraction of the price, and no noticeable colour cast either!

Thomas_Do · 2018-05-04 13:20:25 UTC

Here is my version in color, darktable only.

IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (21 KB)

Edit: And a second more melancholic version by a slight change in the levels module.

afre · 2018-05-04 10:16:22 UTC

Noticed this when inspecting the image (exaggerated for emphasis).

pattern

Eduardo_Battaglia · 2018-05-04 10:46:15 UTC

Rise and shine!

IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (10.4 KB)

shreedhar · 2018-05-04 11:28:14 UTC

Used the brand new GIMP2.10 to introduce some drama.

I left some brush marks on the sea to show my work! One can of course get rid of them if one is careful.

Brian_Innes · 2018-05-04 11:44:47 UTC

@afre, how bizarre, I certainly haven’t noticed that in either the raw image or my processed jpg…

Carmelo_DrRaw · 2018-05-04 12:54:39 UTC

Here is my take on this one, processed with PhotoFlow:

IMG_1925.pfi (73.7 KB)

I also opted for a B&W version, and tried to give maximum emphasis to the tonal variations of the water and concrete structure.

Christopher_Perez · 2018-05-04 16:25:09 UTC

I’m always amazed at how strong the Canon AA filter is over their sensors. Maybe the 5Ds is a bit different? Anyways, it feels like I have to apply far too much sharpening to get something to “pop”. Hence the noise. I can never seem to get the right balance. Oh well.

Having said that, this was processed first in RawTherapee to get two copies, one for the foreground and the other for the sky. Then into the Gimp to blend the sky to the foreground, to crop the scene, to mask the various portions of the grayscale to use as the basis for dodge and burn masks, followed by a bit more fudging of tones in two regions, with a top off of again using masks, this time as a way of applying three different color samples - platinum/palladium for the highlights, brown tones from a photogravure for the mid-tones, and good old fashioned cold silver print tints for the shadows. In all, it probably took 20 mins or so of fiddling around with to get something I thought might “work.”

Interesting photograph to work with. Thanks for letting us play around with it.

yteaot · 2018-05-04 16:28:41 UTC

Darktable IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (6.6 KB)

Thomas · 2018-05-04 16:36:10 UTC

I found the raw file underexposed by almost 2 EV, that too bad that the exposition compensation was set to -2.0EV in the camera. Less noise would have come up in the final picture. @Brian_Innes what was the reason of this -2.0EV compensation ?

Anyway I think that’s a fine picture and it was fun to work on it.

IMG_1925.jpg.out.pp3 (11.4 KB)

MLC · 2018-05-04 16:55:59 UTC

Nice one. Thanks for sharing!
Here’s mine, done mostly in DT and some cleanup in GIMP 2.10.

IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (9.8 KB)

Probably not the sunrise or sunset you had in mind, but I had fun playing with it.

shreedhar · 2018-05-04 19:11:21 UTC

I somehow felt that the photo is an ideal candidate for a high key approach for B&W conversion. This dreamy interpretation looks nice!

IMG_1925BW.jpg.out.pp3 (11.7 KB)

Edit: This also may stand out more (from the point of view of being a competition entry)

clennep · 2018-05-04 20:20:07 UTC

afre · 2018-05-04 20:34:07 UTC

Maybe it is a case of birefringence (due to the ND filter?). Nothing that subtle smoothing cannot fix.

BTW, the breakwater reminds me of a

I like a bright and cheerful day.

@clennep Unfortunately, there is some posterization in the sky.

msd · 2018-05-05 09:36:56 UTC

darktable: IMG_1925_01.CR2.xmp (8.7 KB)

gadolf · 2018-05-05 17:31:15 UTC

Thanks for sharing.

IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (31.2 KB)

Wrapping it up (added local contrast, haze removal, hot pixels and a slight temperature increase)

IMG_1925.CR2.xmp (35.0 KB)

Dave_Jones · 2018-05-06 09:18:02 UTC

Thanks for a great photo to play with.
First time I have edited in months!
There is loss of detail/darkening on the breakwater in the foreground because of reducing image size.

Images such as this remind me of WW1 photography, so first I switched off base curve.I used colour correction for a sepia tone effect, vignette, default graduated density. Denoise(profiled), pushed levels to the right a bit for a gloomy tone, masked the sky in tone curve (med contrast).
Nothing extreme, just little nudges in tones.
Do you have another image with a longer exposure time, giving a more mirror like effect on the ocean?

resized|690x460!